Monday, September 18, 2006

"Do You Mind if I Beat You to Death?"

Booman Tribune:


Habibullah, was captured in November 2002. He was locked in an isolation cell with his hands shackled to the wire ceiling over his head. The report describes how he was literally kicked to death over several days.
The guards found him "uncooperative", and he was given multiple "peroneal strikes" - a disabling blow to the leg just above the knee. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt Thomas Curtis told investigators.

A lawyer for one of the guards who kneed Habibullah in this fashion told US investigators: "My client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."

When Habibullah started coughing up phlegm and complaining of chest pains, the guards laughed at him. Eventually his dead body was found hanging from the handcuffs that still chained him to the ceiling. A post-mortem examination found that he was probably killed by a blood clot, caused by the leg injuries, which travelled to his heart and blocked the blood supply to his lungs.

Dilawar, a taxi driver, was detained in December 2002 as he drove past a US base that had earlier come under rocket attack. Passengers he had picked up were carrying suspicious items.

Spc Corey Jones, an interrogator, told investigators that Dilawar spat in his face. He responded with a couple of knee strikes.

"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his God," Spc Jones said. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny." The report says it became a running joke and prison guards kicked Dilawar just to hear him scream "Allah". "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes," he said.

During an interrogation, the severely injured Dilawar begged a translator to get him a doctor. The translator says he told the interrogators, but one replied: "He's OK. He's just trying to get out of his restraints."

An autopsy found that Dilawar died of heart failure caused by "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities". The coroner, Lieutenant-Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, told a pre-trial hearing that his legs "had basically been pulpified ... I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."

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